Blog Archives - A Portfolio Life

A Portfolio Life

Notes on Bankers (5) : Light-Touch Regulation a Very Modern Oxymoron

21/1/2014

Let's get back to those Regulators who are supposed to be the gatekeepers of common law, common sense and common decency. Actually, thinking about it, has anyone ever told them that's their job?.

I have it on good authority – by which of course I mean a drunken banker - that one of the highest regulators during the banking meltdown currently absolves himself from all blame by using the rationalisation that he was told to have a light-touch. If so, you really can trace some of this back to Peter "guacamole" Mandelsons' weasely apologia that we're intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich – something Blair seems to have taken as career advice.

Anyway, years ahead of the Co-Op scandal, I was told by three separate people on three separate occasions that the people managing the Co-op weren't fit to manage the local hairdressers, 'apart from the one who does actually manage the local hairdressers'.

I always counteracted this with the argument – 'well, looking around, I can't help thinking they couldn't make more of a mess of it than, say, actual bankers.' To which all three people, looked at me, sighed and said, 'no really, I'm serious'.

So, here's the question. If a poet/gambler living in the wilds of Shropshire, with occasional drunken contact with middle-ranking bankers, knew 10 years ago that the Co-Operative Bank was run by people who'd struggle to run Shifnal Town Council better than it already is, why did so many people in positions of power let them?

Notes on Bankers (4) : Free Bets

21/1/2014

I was going to write something about the bonus culture, but then I remembered I already had. I have nothing more to add, so here's an extract from The Northern Line to Shropshire. This piece was written in 2009 when I was coming to then end of my time as a successful gambler.

Free Bets

When I think of the mess bankers have made of this country I see it through the prism of my own gambling. When I have a good year, I'm pleased but careful, it's too easy to be fooled by randomness in this game. I enjoy some of the profits and put the rest by to try to protect my fund against inevitable future losing-runs. Far from being the undisciplined addict that would fit the popular perception of gamblers, if anything I bet too conservatively. And when I lose, as is the case right now, I lose. No excuses. No bail-out.

Bankers, on the other hand, used a simple herd mentality to ride the housing bubble with over-borrowed funds, and when they had good years paid themselves a huge chunk of the profits because “we're worth it”. When they crashed, wiping out their existing funds unfathomable times over, they got us to cover their losses, and went back to mindlessly surfing the next rising market.

Forget bonuses. There's no skill in a free bet.

Notes on Bankers (3) If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Oh.

20/1/2014

I like listening to bankers talk about banking, They often let slip things that they're probably not meant to. Of course, this is exactly why the coffee houses of the City were so successful back in the day (centuries before Starbucks); why the pavements outside City pubs remain a better bet for inside information than the Hargreaves Lansdown newsletter, and why Regulators have no excuse whatsoever for pretending they didn't know what was going on.

Anyway, I liked this quote in the Guardian attributed to Declan Williams, a banker, aged 50. It confirms something another friend told me after a few too many XO Cognacs. Put simply, banks are fucked and currently it's all just a devil-take-the-hindmost, dead-cat bounce of a last-ditch money grab dressed up as business as usual (I think that's what he said. I may have overlooked the odd mathematical model and occasional drunken rationalisation – but hey – XO cognac).

Here's how, the presumably more sober, Williams put it :

"There's definitely been a reaction (to lending) by the banks. If you really drilled in hard enough, a lot of the banks are basically bust. They can't afford to crystallise their own losses. They've got a huge amount of debt underwater. They cosmetically keep these companies alive, but downstream, the SME community has their money sucked out. If you're an SME and you're very asset rich they'll still pawn-broke you. And if you're an entrepreneur, they'll entertain you, because they have to be out there saying 'we're open for business' but you won't see any money."

Notes on Bankers (2) - What's their Myers-Briggs profile?

20/1/2014

We were sitting in a City watering-hole and definitely the better for wear. A banker friend had just been through some training that had used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (again) and sought my views on said instrument.

Lubricated to just the right level of insight and indignation, I went off on one about it being a rank piece of pseudo-science, old-fashioned quackery pedalled by shameless charlatans to HR folk too easily fooled by stage-managed flummery and overly keen on the veneer of expertise it bestows.

And then, despite myself I couldn't help guessing what type he was.
"E-N-T-J ?"

"Of course," he said. "You ?"

"E-N-T-P"

"Ah, yes. That makes sense. But there was something I didn't understand. The woman kept saying that E-N-T-J was a classic banker profile but, if that's the case, why is it that so many of my bosses have been C-U-N-Ts ?"

Notes on Bankers (1) - They're Good for Lunch

19/1/2014

The "Working" section of this site has far fewer posts than the "Writing" and "Gambling" sections, so let's rectify that with a series of notes about bankers.

Let's start with a scene from Woody Allen's Love and Death (his grand parody of Russian Literature).
A young boy is talking to his priest. The boy asks, "What's a Jew?"
The priest says, "What, you've never seen a Jew? Here, I have some pictures."
"Oh wow," says the boy, looking at them, "and do they all have these horns and tails?"

And so it is with bankers today (and yes I did choose a comparison with uncomfortable historical parallels). Me included. For I often find myself frothing at the mouth at the thought of all the crap the financial industry has dumped over our heads these last few years, whilst continuing to feather their own nests with impunity. Business as usual – what a chilling phrase.

The only problem with my anger is that some of my best friends are bankers. Not only that, but I still work within the industry on occasion, albeit in that woolly-minded, liberal offshoot called Training and Development. And whilst I might have flights of fancy where I wreak a terrible vengeance on the heads of evil corporate psychopaths and narcissists, it's fair to say I always manage to exempt the people I actually know. (Well, most of them).

Truth is, I like their company – my friends that is – and I like seeing them in their London habitat. Going to a Corney and Barrow in the City is pretty much the same as a visit to the Zoo. My friends are good company, funny and intelligent, are old enough to have some perspective and, on the whole, are as despairing of this world as I am.

More importantly, they're very good at picking up the bill in posh restaurants.

Lampeter Values

14/1/2014

As you know I've been thinking about decency and stuff of late, in a work context. By the by I came across a speech delivered by a Bob Fonow to people graduating in 2012 at his, and my, alma mater, the tiny Welsh university in Lampeter (photograph above).

I've put a (heavily edited) version below, not because I think these specifically are Lampeter values - I suspect he just used it as a nice way of packaging and presenting his own beliefs – but because, that said, it still chimes with something within me.

You and I know this: only a select few, only a very few, can graduate from Lampeter.

I’m a turnaround manager and corporate troubleshooter. I get called when the situation is dire, when companies are deeply distressed and unlikely to survive. And somehow I’m usually able to make a contribution, and save jobs. At least so far – and in many countries.

People sometime ask me how I do this work? Well, I work hard and study hard, but I think it also has something to do with what I call Lampeter values.

It has to do with struggle and self reliance. This institution has always struggled to survive. Often with very little help. That quality remains part of everyday life here. If you want to perform a play, you produce the play. If you want a sports team, you organize the sports team. Self reliance is a Lampeter value.

And it has to do with decency: a quality of kindness, consideration and fairness that is inherent in St. David life. I don’t mean a sentimental kindness, or a fake niceness. I mean manners, respect and collegiality.

Today the forces of greed, aggression, and intolerance have gained ascendancy. A winner take all attitude prevails. And every day we hear the bleakest of bleak words: austerity – a word totally without political imagination. These are seductive forces for some people, but destructive to a fair and moral society. I can tell you from my experience in Iraq, rebuilding the country after the war, more recently in Palestine, and other turnaround assignments, that Lampeter values of kindness, consideration and fairness are much stronger forces.

Thinking about this, I'd say there is something that almost all Lampeter alumni do share, something which is almost a pre-condition for applying to study there, or for getting in through Clearing as at least half the people did when I was there, including me. We share an absence of naked ambition.

This does help explain why very few of us have made much of a mark on the world but also partly explains why we had such a good time there; why we stay in close touch like a venn diagram of little gangs; why we remain fond of the place ever after, and why so many of us are just good, decent people living good, decent lives.

Not me, obviously...losers.

A Few Good Men

6/1/2014

I've been talking to a major bank about how they might go about being a better bank. A good bank. I've spent many hours walking the dog thinking about the subject. And in many ways I've been guilty of complicating matters. Major culture change may be hard to achieve, but it's easy enough to say what's required.

I like this quote from Andrew Tyrie, one of the politicians charged with banking reform.

“What we've seen in banking is no more than a reflection of the human condition.”

And I very much like this line from the advert for MoreThan Insurance.

“We're just doing what any decent person would do”

A New Year's Toast to Designers

4/1/2014

I used to be wildly opinionated – back in simpler times when there was always room for one bore in the pub. Before he became the leader of UKIP. Before the birth of the internet and every dickhead in eternity started swinging their willies. Before “under the line” comments of such unfathomable stupidity became the majority view and held up a mirror to one's own worst ramblings.

I determined to change. I determined to look for the positive. I even started an “in praise of” facebook group that celebrated the nicer side of life, that worked as a rejoinder to the darker side of internet twattishness.

But then my mother-in-law bought us a toaster for Christmas, to replace one whose obsolescence had been carefully calibrated by engineers working to a capitalist template of wanton consumption that frankly had already put me in a bad mood.

And it was then that Victor Meldrew erupted from within me. Like a bad dose of acid reflux. Not immediately, for the new toaster is a thing of beauty. The man, and I am quite sure it was designed by a man, had hewn it from black sheen and shiny metallic buttons. It leans into the kitchen work-tops with a sense of its own entitlement. I'd be very surprised if its formative years weren't spent at Oxford where it got a first in PPE whilst pretending it never went to Eton. It expects you to bow down before it.

It's a classic, apparently. As though a designer can name something such and lo and behold it becomes one. Or maybe it's ironic. The Tefal Avanti Classic. Forwards-leaning and timeless. I see what they were aiming for at their strokey-beard meetings. They just forgot one slight thing.

It doesn't take a slice of bread. Barely half a slice. It's the most fucked up piece of half-arsed, form-over-function, cuntishness I've suffered since Victor Kiam bought the fucking company.

Just sharing...